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Giorgio Mammoliti: Political provocateur turned Rob Ford spokesman

Once easily dismissed as fringe loudmouth, the colourful councillor now has a prominent role at city hall.

Giorgio Mammoliti signals how Mayor Rob Ford would like council to vote on a motion during debate on whether to expand private garbage and recycling collection.
(STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

By Daniel DaleUrban Affairs Bureau

Sat., Aug. 13, 2011

Giorgio Mammoliti is sitting at his desk, on which sits a salad he does not seem to have touched. For many city councillors, this is a quiet summer Wednesday. Mammoliti is busy being Mammoliti. Dapper as usual in a dark suit, he is carrying on a lunchtime newspaper interview during the commercial breaks of a radio interview he is also conducting.

“I think this is about panhandling,” he had said a moment before the radio interview began, and that seemed reasonable enough. On Tuesday, as you have heard, he said police officers should force panhandlers into hospitals. Call-in-show gold.

But NewsTalk 1010 host Ward Anderson wants to talk about something else — because, as you have heard, Mammoliti said something else on Tuesday that was even more incendiary. He promised to ban whining “communists,” such as the citizens who spoke against budget cuts at City Hall in July, from a Facebook page he had just started.

Mammoliti being Mammoliti. In 1999, he took off his shirt to protest the approval of the Hanlan’s Point nude beach. In 2007, he said the army should be called in to deal with gangs. In both cases, and in too many others to list, Mammoliti was dismissed as a fringe loudmouth.

He is just as loud today, but his utterances are no longer those of a marginalized outsider. Mayor Rob Ford, once an outsider himself, has made the city’s premier political provocateur one of the key figures in his administration.

Mammoliti’s possibly-more-important unofficial role: administration spokesperson. With Ford shying away from the media, his former council nemesis and mayoral rival has emerged as one of his most prominent advocates — partly by sheer force of personality, partly because the administration has both tolerated and encouraged his advocacy.

When media outlets began reporting in July on an incident in which Ford is alleged to have flipped his middle finger at a mother and daughter, Ford’s paid spokesperson, Adrienne Batra, came to the City Hall press gallery — not to speak to reporters herself, but to present Mammoliti to them.

This seemed somewhat comical: the firefighter asking the neighbourhood pyromaniac to put out a low-intensity fire. But, that day, Mammoliti did a perfectly professional job of casting aspersions on the mother. On many other days, he inspires a fury that could, the theory goes, otherwise have been directed at Ford.

“Sometimes he has the ability to draw attention to himself, and his own thoughts, rather than what you (reporters) would like to discuss,” says Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday.

Mammoliti’s controversial comments, Holyday says, do not hurt Ford. “George is different, no doubt about that,” he says, using the name Mammoliti went by in politics until 2003. “I think people are used to the way George expresses himself. So I’m not sure that it reflects on anyone but George.”

But not everyone around Ford is so confident Mammoliti’s musings have no negative impact on how people view a mayor who has granted him legitimacy. One of the other right-leaning members of Ford’s executive committee, Councillor Paul Ainslie, says Mammoliti “needs to tone it down.”

“I’ve said, ‘Giorgio, what are you doing?’ It doesn’t seem to bother him. I think he relishes the fact that he’s kind of the media spokesperson for the executive committee,” Ainslie says.

“The problem with Giorgio is that Giorgio is over the top all the time. Everything he does is over the top. I don’t think it helps the administration.”

“I’m so scheduled,” he says. “I don’t think any woman really appreciates a guy who always has to be on time right that minute. Who has to look at his schedule every time you want to go for an ice cream or something. That’s how powerful this is with me.”

He says his self-discipline extends to his political behaviour. His controversial comments? He means what he says. But also, he says, “It’s strategical” — as usual, making himself perfectly clear but also vulnerable to derision.

“There’s always a strategy. Anybody who thinks I just blurt things out, they’re dreaming in technicolour. I think about everything I say. Anybody who’s a Virgo could understand this: you’re always thinking of what your comments might mean two weeks from now.”

He readily acknowledges that his strategic vision is not always apparent to others. Ford staffers, he says, have asked him to “explain” several of his remarks, including the ones about the communists.

He says the staffers have been satisfied with all of his explanations. And he says they have never attempted to quiet him — not that they would be able to.

“Nobody’s been able to rope me in. You can’t rope me in. I don’t belong to you. I belong to Toronto, and I belong to my electorate,” he says.

Whatever his aim, his red-baiting reminded people of the unusual political odyssey that has fuelled charges that he is an unprincipled opportunist. He was first elected, in 1990, as a 28-year-old New Democrat MPP. Before that, he led a Canadian Union of Public Employees maintenance workers’ local.

He expresses deep regret for his 1994 battle against spousal benefits and adoption rights for same-sex couples, during which he deemed gay people AIDS-prone sexual deviants. He says he was equally out of place in the NDP on other issues — a closet right-winger too naive to know how to cross the floor.

“The minute I was elected on as a caucus member,” he says, “I knew I didn't belong. It didn’t fit me, and I didn’t fit it.”

Former London NDP MPP David Winninger agrees. “He did seem widely out of step,” Winninger says. But former MPP Sharon Murdock, of Sudbury, says he seemed like a real New Democrat to her. “His recollection is, well, selective,” Murdock says. “I thought he fought for the downtrodden quite effectively.” He ran again for the NDP in 1995, losing. Months later, he won the council seat he has held since.

Who votes for this guy? The people of Ward 7, many of whom are among the downtrodden. The ward encompasses much of the Jane-Finch neighbourhood where he grew up as the son of Italian immigrants.

Mammoliti has fought for the community in his own idiosyncratic way. He has both denounced local government spending as wasteful “handouts” and incessantly promoted corporate investment. He sincerely believes the revitalization of Emery Village will be helped by a project he championed to widespread scorn: building North America’s tallest flagpole.

His zeal tests the patience of even his defenders. “He can be an overly enthusiastic individual when he’s directed in whatever direction he’s directed in,” says Holyday. “You’d think Emery Village was the second coming or something, that the next sighting was going to be up there, if you listen to George.”

But even critics say his penchant for headline-making may help him politically. “He comes off as an area celebrity,” says Councillor Shelley Carroll, who thinks his behaviour stains municipal politicians of all stripes. “It’s part of what they love about having him as their councillor.”

Nobody thought of Mammoliti as a David Miller lieutenant. But Mammoliti chaired Miller’s affordable housing committee. Now he is leading the charge against Miller’s legacy for a mayor he once filed a human rights complaint against.

Mammoliti was unopposed in 2003. His margin of victory was 33 per cent in 2006. It fell to 14 per cent in 2010. Why did he stake his political future on this unlikely alliance?

He says, credibly, that he and Ford agree on much. And, the day after he gleefully divided Toronto into communists and non-communists, he defends his much-mocked willingness to forge an alliance with whomever happens to be running the city.

“It’s best, as a councillor representing a whole city, that I get along with whoever the mayor is of the day,” he says. “Because the city needs us to get along.”

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